Creative Arts

The Creative Arts — Visual Arts, Music, Drama and Dance — provide significant ways of understanding our experiences of the world and living life fully. They are vital ways of communicating, through symbolic forms, ideas, experiences, emotions, values and beliefs. They provide opportunities for personal expression, imagination, creativity and for cultural expression.

The Creative Arts enable us to view ourselves as a diverse and complex society.

Creative Arts K–6 is organised in four strands:

• Visual Arts;

• Music;

• Drama; and

• Dance.

Each strand has its own expressive forms of communication and an extensive body of knowledge, skills, and methods of learning. The syllabus recognises the various ways schools may choose to enhance their approach to the Creative Arts while ensuring that all students have access to the mandatory requirements.

The aim of Creative Arts K–6 is to develop in all students a vital interest in learning in Visual Arts, Music, Drama and Dance. They can value the personal and shared meanings gained from experiencing the artforms; appreciate how the arts celebrate, reflect and challenge societies and cultures; and appreciate how the arts are structured to provide for the communication of ideas including their own.

The objectives set out the ways that each strand can be engaged in by students.

• In Visual Arts students will make artworks, and appreciate their own works and those of others.

• In Music students will perform and organise sound, and listen to and discuss their own music and that of others.

• In Drama students will make and perform drama, and appreciate their own dramatic works and those of others.

• In Dance students will compose and perform dance, and appreciate their own dances and those of others.

Students will value the diverse ways that each of the artforms can be made and appreciated.

The outcomes are organised using the objectives of each strand and draw on the further content of each strand, in particular:

• Visual Arts: making and appreciating

• Music: performing, organising sound and listening

• Drama: making, performing and appreciating

• Dance: performing, composing and appreciating.

Creative Arts K–6 forms part of a K–12 continuum, providing a foundation for learning in secondary courses of study in Visual Arts, Music, Drama and Dance.